Understanding alloptions in WordPress

WordPress is an extremely flexible piece of software, and it comes with many different settings. Some are made visible to users via Admin > Settings and others are stored invisibly so users aren’t bothered by them, but all of them are saved in a single database table named wp_options. Today, it looks something like this: This database table actually has a few interesting qualities to it. Conceptually, it’s a very simple key/value approach to storing any kind of arbitrary information. It’s a distant cousin to all of the meta database tables WordPress comes with (for posts, comments, terms, and users) and I’m a big fan of the entire meta-data API – it’s now fully implemented across all major object types (except blogmeta and term_relationshipmeta) and, honestly, it’s one of the few “complete” APIs you’ll interact with inside of WordPress today, aside from probably roles & rewrite rules.
The options API, however, is actually quite a bit different from meta, enough to warrant this blog post, and enough for me to have spent the past 4 days studying it, researching it, and generally trying to find ways to improve how it performs